'Just Clean the Face and Paint In the Hand'
An elderly client brings in a family oil portrait, 60 × 45 cm, signed and dated 1874, on a plain-weave canvas with a single horizontal join. The paint is cupping and flaking along the join and around the left edge. The varnish has yellowed, and old dark retouchings across the sitter's hand no longer match. The client wants the picture 'brightened up' for a wedding in three weeks and asks you to 'just clean the face and paint in the hand'. You have a basic studio with no fume extraction, and a working relationship with a paintings conservator two towns away who charges €60 an hour. The canvas is still on its original stretcher, the tacking margins are intact, and the frame is original but split at one corner. The owners have no insurance and no climate-controlled room; the house is 200 m from the sea.
1. What do you agree to do and what do you refuse? On what principle?
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The controlling principle is that nothing you do should be irreversible, and nothing should be done to unstable paint.
Refuse:
- Cleaning the face in the sense the client means (varnish removal) - that is a solvent operation on a canvas with cupping and flaking. Solvent will travel under lifted flakes and lift original paint. It is also irreversible: an original glaze removed cannot be put back.
- Painting in the hand in oils or an unknown medium over original paint. Retouching must sit on an isolating layer, in a reversible medium, and must be colour-matched to the cleaned picture, not the yellowed one.
Agree:
- A written condition report with photographs.
- Surface cleaning only where it is safe (dry, soft brush, no solvent).
- The split frame corner - a reversible repair with a reversible adhesive, retaining all original material.
- Consolidation of the lifting flakes only if you are trained for it; otherwise it is the conservator's job, and it must happen before anything else touches the surface.
Tell the client plainly: painting the hand now would be decorating over a problem, and it would have to be undone by someone else later at greater cost.
2. How do you handle the three-week wedding deadline and the seaside house?
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Negotiate on facts, not on refusal.
What is achievable in three weeks: surface clean, frame corner repair, consolidation by the conservator if she can take it in, and safe re-hanging advice. That will already lift the picture.
What is not: full varnish removal and accurate retouching. Varnish removal needs tests, a lined-up schedule and drying time between stages; retouching needs the cleaned surface to settle. Doing it fast is how pictures get damaged.
The house is the bigger problem. At 200 m from the sea, with no climate control, a freshly cleaned and retouched canvas will face salt-laden air and sharp RH swings. Advise: not on an external wall, not above a fireplace or radiator, not in direct sun, and a simple hygrometer so they can see what the room is doing. A picture that has survived 150 years on its original stretcher is more at risk from a rushed treatment than from another year of yellow varnish.
Offer an alternative for the wedding: clean the frame, rehang it well, and light it properly. If they want more, book the full treatment for after the event, with the conservator's quote in writing so they can plan and save.
3. What documentation do you produce, and why does it matter here more than usual?
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Before treatment:
- A condition report: dimensions, support, stretcher, join, areas of cupping and loss mapped on a diagram, frame damage, photographs in raking light and in normal light, front and back.
- A photograph of the tacking margins and the stretcher - they are intact and are evidence of originality; they must be recorded before anyone reframes.
- A treatment proposal listing every material and solvent you intend to use, signed and dated by the client.
During: dated photographs of each stage.
After: a treatment record, materials list, and a note of what was not done and why.
Why it matters here: the owners have no insurance. If the picture is damaged, disputed, or later sold, the only protection either of you has is a paper trail showing the condition it arrived in. The intact tacking margins and original stretcher are also value-bearing features that a careless reframe would destroy, and a record is what proves they were there. Finally, if the work goes to the conservator, your report is what she will work from - an undocumented handover is how treatments get duplicated or contradicted.